Continued From Page 5#33
Mindful Holiday Feasting
Most people look forward to the joy of traditional holiday feasts. They are times of celebration for everyone, except mindless eaters. For mindless eaters, gatherings centered exclusively around food can turn not-so-merry. Worry about gaining extra holiday pounds is nothing to celebrate. Holidays elevate feasting to a special status, and they encourage mindless eating by inviting all to overeat.
Spending time with relatives during holidays is another surefire way to trigger mindless eating. Reconnecting with family can be as stressful as it is joyous. People get very emotional, and conflict is more likely to erupt. Hanging out with your family can reignite feelings of inadequacy or of being controlled, rejected, or wanting to please. Or, it may bring up intense memories of happy holidays from the past, which can make you miss more regular contact with your family. One woman described the Christmas holidays as the ultimate challenge because they are a double-dose of her two weaknesses: family and food.
Skill Builder: Planning Holiday Meals
- Plan ahead mindfully. Think about which foods define the holiday for you. Plan to have some of that special food. Offer to prepare the meal to have greater control over the menu. Make foods that don't trigger or increase your vulnerability to mindless eating.
- If the holiday meal is to be eaten at someone else's home, eat a mindful snack before you go. Don't wait until after the football game or holiday parade. If you do, your body will send you hunger cues that may be difficult to satiate in a controlled manner.
- Be mindful of unique ethnic and cultural traditions.
- If you are a chronic undereater, holidays can be extremely difficult. Reach back in your memory and identify what you liked to eat before your eating issues began. Eat what would make you happy. Connect yourself with the meaning of the holiday; for example, if it is the Fourth of July, celebrate the liberty you have to choose your foods.
- To prevent overeating, stay in touch with the experience moment-to-moment. At the table, eat slowly and look at everything. Smell and taste your food. Breathe in the holiday atmosphere.
- After finishing your plate, wait twenty minutes before getting a second helping. It takes the part of your brain that helps to regulate your appetite, about twenty minutes to register what you ate, and to send the information that you are full to your body and brain. Allow your body and mind the necessary time to send and receive these signals.
- If the same food is prepared in different ways, choose your favorite. For example, if there are mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, consider which will give you the most pleasure, or have a small amount of both.
- If you have trouble knowing how much you have eaten, put the food on your plate in piles that don't overlap. Start with this, and then wait and see how your body responds.
#34
Mindful Dining Out
Depending on your relationship to food, eating out can either be a special treat or a nightmare. Jill, for example, loved interesting, quaint cafés and was a regular at many local Thai restaurants. She didn't have to cook, and the flavor far surpassed anything she could create. The dark side of eating out was worrying about the excess calories. She had no control over how the food was prepared, and didn't know how many calories she was consuming, so she felt guilty. When she dined out as a reward to herself, she mindlessly overate. Eating out was a mixture of intense pleasure and equally intense remorse.
If dining out is a special event for you, that doesn't give you permission to eat mindlessly. Attentive, aware, nonjudgmental eating can take place anywhere. You can eat mindfully at restaurants exactly the way you do at home, by eating slowly and savoring your food. Learn to think of the restaurant's ambience and service as the real treat, rather than the food. Going out to eat is often a form of entertainment or a social event. Sometimes you may feel forced to choose between being social or engaging in mindless eating. However, the two need not be mutually exclusive. If dining out with friends brings up negative feelings, or causes you stress, be mindful of what's behind your concern. Your fear may cause you to assume that you will lose control. To combat the fear, use it as an opportunity to be mindful of your relationships, and to practice your mindful eating skills.
